I went to Washington Boulevard, turned right, went to Fruitville and then headed east just past Tuttle.
John Gutcheon sat at the reception desk on the first floor of the three-story Building C in the complex of identical buildings marked A through D.
Building C housed the offices of Children’s Services of Sarasota. Buildings A, B and D had a few empty offices but most were filled by dentists, urologists, a cardiology practice, investment advisors, jewelry and estate appraisers, young lawyers and a dealer in antique toys.
John was the receptionist, dispensing advice, directing calls, folding sheets and stuffing them into envelopes and warding off people who had come to the wrong place.
“You want to hear a dentist tale?” he asked when he saw me come through the door.
“Is it funny?”
“No,” John said, rolling his eyes. “It’s the truth. You want a joke, I’ll tell you one when I finish with the dentist business.”
John was thin, blond, about thirty and unmistakably and unapologetically gay. His sharp tongue was ever ready to cut off those who questioned his lifestyle by look or word.
“How did your art show go?” I asked.
The last time I had seen him Gutcheon had told me that two of his paintings were going to be shown at the Wardell Studio during the monthly art walk.
“No sale,” he said, holding up both hands with a shrug.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You didn’t see them,” he said. “Sally said she’d try to get you to go.”
“I’m-”
“Not a people person,” he completed. “Yes, that much is obvious. Can I tell you about the dentist thing?”
“Yes.”
“Building D,” he said. “John Gault, DDS. His real name isn’t John Gault but I call him that. You know, Ayn Rand?”
“Not intimately,” I said.
“Look who’s trying to display a sense of humor,” he said. “Anyway, you wouldn’t want to be intimate with Ayn Rand. Interesting writer but I hear she was a bitch.”
I nodded to show I was listening.
“Well, anyway,” he went on. “The dentist. Tooth gets chipped. One back here.” He curled up the right side of his mouth and pointed. “Got chipped. Piece came right off in that Chinese restaurant on Clark, the little one. Nice people. Something in the fortune cookie. Cookie says, ‘Your plans will soon change.’ I went to Dr. Gault the next day and he said I needed two crowns, eleven hundred dollars each. Mr. Lewis Fonesca, I do not have two thousand and two hundred dollars. He says I can pay it out for the next three centuries but I check with other people and my friend Pauly tells me to go to his dentist. You want the result?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, Pauly’s dentist looks at the X-rays, examines my teeth and says, ‘You don’t need two crowns. There’s nothing wrong with that second tooth.’ Furthermore, he says the chipped tooth doesn’t need a crown, just a filling. He fills it immediately, charges me sixty dollars.”
Gutcheon looked at me for a reaction.
“Interesting,” I said.
“It is, but I can see you are not one who is interested.” He sighed. “The worst part?”
“What?”
“I went to John Gault because he is gay. Betrayed by one of my own. You see the irony?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s not the irony you want to see,” he said.
“It’s Sally. Go up. Go up. You want a joke? You still collecting them?”
“Yes.”
“What do you give a man who has everything?”
“I don’t know.”
“Antibiotics.”
I took out my pad and wrote the joke.
“You didn’t even smile,” said Gutcheon.
“It’s humorous,” I said.
“George Carlin once said, ‘Don’t you find it a little unsettling that dentists call what they do ‘a practice’?”
“He said doctors,” I said, putting my notebook away.
“Well, I amended it to fit… never mind.”
The phone in front of him rang. He picked it up and I went into the open elevator.
Children’s Services took two floors. The second, where I got off, was big, open and filled with partitioned cubicles you could see over. The room was a dirge of voices, every once in a while a word or phrase coming through. Inside each three-sided cubicle was the work space of a caseworker who did his or her best to keep the few square feet from reverting to nature.
Sally’s cubicle was to the right. I passed a cubicle in which a short, thin young Hispanic caseworker named Amy Valdez was leaning toward the chair of an even thinner and maybe a lot older and haggard black woman.
Most of the narrow metal desks in the cubicles were covered with files and notes, and on the walls, almost as if it had been an assigned duty, were photographs of each caseworker’s family.
It reminded me of the places I used to get my haircuts, the mirrors where young women put photographs of their kids where you could see them. The haircutters wanted to kick the tips up. I never resisted. The last time I had been to one of those places had been more than four years earlier. I cut my own hair, what there was of it to cut.
The caseworkers, like Sally, put their photos up there to remind them that they had a life beyond the cubicles, the weeping mothers, the addicts, the teen prostitutes, abused babies, creatures who attacked and showed their teeth and were classified as human because there was no box to check for “other.”
Sally was alone on the phone, her back to me. In a frame on her desk was a photograph of her two children, Michael, fourteen, and Susan, eleven. Sally said they liked me, though they thought I was a little weird. I wasn’t sure I liked me but I agreed that I was a little weird.
“This is the third time, Sarah Ann,” Sally was saying.
Sally and I had been keeping company, nothing more than that, really, for almost three years. Sally was two years older than I, pretty, plump, dark short hair, perfect skin and a voice like Lauren Bacall.
She worked ten-hour days, half days most weekends, trying to save the threatened children of Sarasota County one by one. There were more losses than saves, but without the people in this office, there would have been no saves but the ones that chance happened to touch.
“I can’t keep coming there,” Sally said. “It’s almost twenty miles each way, but it’s not the distance. It’s the time. No excuses. Tomorrow. Sometime before noon. Sarah Ann, you be home. You have Jean home. We talk. I take her out and talk to her. You mess up this one and I turn it over.”
Sally paused, saw me, nodded, listened to whatever Sarah Ann was saying and then said, “Sarah Ann, tomorrow, before noon. There is nothing more to say. There are no more chances. Good-bye.”
Sally hung up.
“She won’t be there, will she?” I asked.
“You could tell?”
I shrugged.
“She might,” said Sally, swiveling around to face me, “but she won’t the next time or the time after that. This one will go to court. And given the judges on the bench, odds are exactly three to one the kid will go back to her mother.”
“Drugs?”
“And men. And… who knows?”
“I have an idea for an ad,” I said. “Television. You find real addicts, young ones, put the camera on them, black and white, and on the screen you put their ages, first names and the drugs they use. Off-camera voice just asks them questions, which they mess up, and the kids who see the ads know that they are watching people whose minds are-”
“You’ve given this some thought, huh, Lew?”
Then it hit me. I must have shown it.
“What’s wrong?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I said. “It was… my wife’s. I’d forgotten until…”
“Have a seat,” Sally said, pulling the chrome-and-vinyl chair out of the corner.
I sat and took off my cap.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what? I’m getting off at seven. Kids want to go to Shaner’s for pizza.”